OP: My mother-in-law was late bringing me meals. (cr快乐大海)

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@biologyghost
OP: My mother-in-law was late bringing me meals. (cr快乐大海)
Gotta tell you guys something wild in the Chinese fan sphere
So some fanartist drew a “sexy” (read: booby) version of a (cartoon) character who is traditionally very non-sexualised. Fans of the character got mad about it because it’s kind of groundbreaking how that character is written and portrayed and this art totally ignores the entire point of the character. They demanded the art be deleted. In response to that other people said, well what the fanartist did may be distateful but they have every right to draw what they’re into. The two sides fight for days and each starts a harassment campaign and even report their “opponents’” accounts.
So far so typical. But things eventually come to a head and they decide that this will be settled by votes - not through a poll. Through donations to a children’s education charity via each side’s portal. Whoever can get the highest amount of donation wins.
And that is how this charity received over 1 million in donations in three days lol. Oh btw the “freedom of expression” side won by a landslide (960k to 40k)
From now on this is how all petty fandom disputes should be settled.
Both donation groups finished collecting donations on May 31st, and the charity has since reached out to the "freedom of expression" group's organizers to notify them that their donations will be specifically allocated to girls. The charity works with schools to allow impoverished students to go to high school (which isn't free in China), so they will be distributing 7500 RMB each for 128 girls to attend their 3 years of high school.
Also for anyone curious, the character is Luye from The Legend of Hei II. Official design vs. the fanart under the cut:
Why are you using chatgpt to get through college. Why are you spending so much time and money on something just to be functionally illiterate and have zero new skills at the end of it all. Literally shooting yourself in the foot. If you want to waste thirty grand you can always just buy a sportscar.
I’m really starting to think you people don’t understand what university is for. You’re buying the accreditation that you can do these things. It doesn’t matter how you do them.
I can assure you if you're going to school to be an xray tech or a surgical assistant it does very much matter how you do the stuff your accreditation says you can do. We aren't all business majors.
Yes, but you actually can’t do an X-ray without an X-ray machine and you can’t do surgery without scalpels. We already rely on technology for everything. Offloading cognitive tasks just frees us up to do more. If you can do your job with chatgpt, but can’t without, you can still do your job. I’m sure you would find university much much harder without access to google or the internet too.
Do you think scalpels are magic and do a little song and dance and perform the surgery themselves like Beauty and the Beast characters and the surgeon is there to conduct the background music
What do you think will happen when your employer, who hired you because they saw you have a certificate to say that you have specific skills and knowledge, starts expecting you to have and use those skills and knowledge and you can't because you think a university degree is just a piece of paper that you buy
"Offloading cognitive tasks just frees us up to do more"
When you're in school, the cognitive tasks are there for the explicit purpose of being brain exercises. It's weightlifting. It is FOR building your mental muscles and making you a stronger thinker and planner. "Offloading the cognitive tasks", then, is just Not Doing The Weightlifting. What happens when you pay for your gym membership and just stand around messing around on your phone? Nothing. Nothing happens. Just money leaving your wallet. Nothing else.
Using AI is a short term pleasure that is going to fuck you over in the long term, and by the time you realize that you didn't build the necessary muscles you need for the cognitive tasks required of your ACTUAL JOB (or, like, adult life in general), it's going to be too late to do anything about it... except going back and doing the real work all over again to get you up to speed.
And if your response as a college student is "Ugh i'm already good at this though, i don't need the practice" -- sweetie, you have no idea how good at it you could be though. If you're good at it now but you keep working on it, you're going to ASTONISH yourself in a couple years with how good at it you can get. I was a good writer when I was in college; I am an ASTRONOMICALLY better writer now, because I put in the work. But you have to lift the weights and build your muscles to get there, even when it's tedious. There aren't any shortcuts for this. You can be content with your own mediocrity, or you can believe that you're capable of growing towards brilliance. Which one will you choose, mediocrity or brilliance? You get to pick right now.
I’m a Surgical Assistant and that ChatGPT stan pissed me off so I’ll use my job as an example. 90% of our job as surgical assists comes down to memorizing the names and usages of the thousands of unique instruments and equipment and sutures involved in surgery as well as having the critical thinking skills to anticipate the needs and expectations of the surgeons we work with. That’s a “cognitive load” that cannot be pawned off on a computer. If I relied on ChatGPT to tell me what instruments to have ready for a case, it would create a composite of what the most likely instruments to be used in a given surgery and assuming that it’s even accurate, it would be effectively useless if my surgeon didn’t use any of those because each doctor is different. Surgeons get pissed off if you give them the wrong diameter size suture, so why would I rely on a soulless algorithm to tell me what my surgeon wants? And if I’m not figuring out for myself what they may need based off my own learning and not machine learning then why am I even there? There’s a reason robotic surgery still requires a surgical assistant and a surgeon to operate the robot, technology is an easement not a replacement for human labor and in college learning is the labor you should be doing.
A common thread with ChatGPT simps seems to be that they truly believe all labor is as easy as their cushy middle management jobs in the tech industry. “Buying an accreditation” might work there but can you imagine someone in the medical field not actually knowing the subject they’re licensed or accredited to know? I’ll give you a hint: the word we typically use is malpractice.
I would also like to add as somone who did a one degree about 10 years ago when academia was just startingto make the switch from fully physical to full online, it is entirely possible to do a degree without really using the Internet or Google. You turn up to lectures, you collect the reading list, you go to the library, you find the book you need on the shelf, you take it and several others back to whatever desk you're working at and the you read them and make notes (I made notes on a PC but plenty of people in my group used paper notes pads), you critically evaluate the information amd decide whether or not to include it in your assessments. No Google required, it's not that fucking hard.
Let me introduce you all to the building trades concept of "buying your book."
A "book" is (a slightly outdated beyond this specific topic) term for your union card, which states that you're a member in good standing of your local/union and ostensibly means that you have the coinciding skills that go with the title of journeyworker or apprentice or whatever. Typically, to become a journeyman, you serve an apprenticeship (usually 5 years) and then have to take a test of some sort to prove you've acquired all the necessary skills to earn the qualification. The card/book is the proof that you have a basic level of competency.
Sometimes though certain locals, usually in the South or other places where right-to-work or similar attitudes are stronger, will "sell books," which is to say they will allow people who either haven't served an apprenticeship or passed a skills test to buy their card so that they may work on union jobs.
There's a myriad of reasons and reasonings on why a local might do this, but on the ground, it means that if I'm on a big job, anyone from areas or locals that have a reputation for selling books is automatically assumed to be under-qualified. This sucks, because I've known plenty of badass hands from Southern Locals, but because they come from book-selling locals, they had to overcome that stigma. To an extent, this whole thing is self-regulating because if you bought a book and can't hack it, you only come to a travel job once before they will never invite you back, but it is a constant source of sand in the gears for the whole labour management process.
Anyway, learning is important and faking learning WILL bite you in the ass if you have any desire to exist in the world in a meaningful way.
Also, just so you know, real life professional shit isn't like school. You don't get endless chances to get it right when you fuck it up . If you are found to have fraudulently acquired a qualification that you have no idea how to use, you not only get fired, but you get blacklisted in your inustry if not legally charged with fraud.
That will follow you for the rest of your life. That will completely lock you out of your chosen field and all it's related feilds forever.
What are you going to do when you're still paying off a degree that you can't use because you've been flagged in the system? What are you going to do when your future employers run a police check and find that you've been charged with occupational fraud? Do you think they're going to hire you anywhere when that comes up? Do you have any idea how difficult it is to get a job with an unrelated criminal charge, let alone one directly tied to your job?
Come on guys. You don't get do-overs with this shit. Don't fuck your life up because you didn't want to pay attention at uni. There are real world consequences for this shit.
Sometimes on guard duty I have to put my foot down about something and every so often the person I'm speaking to will say some shit like "You get off on this, don't you?"
And while I understand they MEAN to say "you're on a power trip" or "you are taking this rule too seriously", I am always, always struck by the temptation to go, "Yep. You got me. All my life I've been slowly training towards the ultimate sexual high of forcing a thirty-something tryhard in a backwards snapback to remove his dad's preowned Ford F-150 from the dollar store fire lane. Nothing revs my engine quite like forcing guys named Dustin to submit to regional traffic laws. Ooh, are you gonna be a dirty boy and leave it idling too?"
fuckin dipshit
Using mortise-and-tenon joints to build an entrance way with 35m width × 6m depth. According to other sources, this is in Longnan, Gansu, and was built by 36 carpenters and 4 joinery experts over 6 months, costing around 5M RMB in total.
Combining modern elements and traditional techniques for a Chinese-style magic show
the silmarillion is wild because you read it and you're like huh okay, and then you read lotr and it turns out everyone's just going around doing their own thing while the surviving elves are living through the final chapters of a post-apocalyptic horror story
rivendell's a pretty chill place, right? everyone gets along splendidly. dream retirement home et cetera. solid chance the guy you're having afternoon tea with has either survived or personally committed war crimes. also the reason it's so chill is elrond has this magic ring that makes it so the whole place exists slightly outside normal time
galadriel's been around since the beginning, like, for pretty much all of middle-earth's history you understand, she has Seen it all and despite what you may have been led to believe is at all times this close to snapping. also the reason lothlorien is so chill is she has this magic ring that makes it so the whole place exists slightly outside normal time
i can't emphasize enough how much of a post-apocalyptic horror story thranduil lives in. homeland destroyed and half his people massacred. has fucken sauron in his backyard and the spawn of the primordial beast that eats light puttering about on his lawn. a dragon lives next door. does NOT have a magic ring and is therefore obliged to rule over his murderforest in normal time
just so we're all on the same page here, legolas' day job before joining the fellowship was to hunt the spawn of the primordial beast that eats light and it's not like, a big deal or anything. he just has to do it. he's used to it.
'elves are leaving middle-earth and it's so sad :(' they have ptsd samwise.
no way dude no way. there's just no way
in 2026 i am wishing for all of us the energy of bilbo baggins, who was headhunted for an extremely well paid role he had no qualifications or experience for, blagged the interview, and within his first week found a magic ring that does the job for him
Every time Sean Astin makes a statement on whether or not Sam and Frodo were indeed gay for each other in lord of the rings he’s always like “well we have to acknowledge that attitudes around sexuality have changed dramatically over the past several decades and since authorial intent is only up to speculation, the story is open to multiple readings, some of which might have different significances for different groups of people also they kiss on the lips because I said so”
at the rose city comic con panel this month a fan asked them (sean and elijah) if sam and frodo were in love and they said
Sean: .....yes. absolutely
Elijah: 100 percent.
Sean: dont tell rosie
Rosie: "This is my husband Sam, and that's his husband, Frodo. Frodo is my husband-in-law. I'm not into him, he's he's a bit too 'elfy' for my taste, but Sam likes him, and that's fine with me. As far as I know, Frodo can't give Sam children, but Frodo looks after ours all the same, so I don't mind sharing Sam if it means another pair of eyes on the wee ones. In all honesty, our family tree is right simple compared to some hobbits. Yes, I'm referrin' to you Lobelia, over there pretendin' you ain't eavesdroppin'. Still bitter you ain't got either of my boys or their house, eh?"
Tbh it's canon that Frodo invited Sam and Rosie to move in to Bag End after their wedding and they all lived there for a couple of years until Frodo went to Valinor, so yeah. Running with it.
And once Rosie dies, Sam says his goodbyes and disappears after him.
what’s funny is people assuming that rosie would somehow be too dim or naive to KNOW that sam loved frodo, instead of looking at a guy who would loyally follow a beloved friend to hell and then help carry him home again, and not be like ‘oh i can’t not fuck that.’
Polyamory, specifically polyandry, would be an interesting solution to the oddball population of the Shire.
The Shire is excellent farming country, with consistently good weather, and only one tough winter in living memory; hobbits like to produce large families; they’re resistant to disease, rarely violent, and encounter few dangers. It is usual for hobbits to produce many children, so that (for example) Bilbo and Frodo are unusual in both being only children, with no siblings, and not having children of their own. All of this should point to a population that increases every generation if not doubling outright. Young people (and their ideologies!) should rapidly outnumber the old with an ever-increasing effect and impact on society. However, the Shire has a surprisingly stable history; it never seems to increase or decrease greatly in population, and the bell curve of age seems… demographically balanced? There certainly isn’t a conflict from rising young bloods challenging the middle-aged reactionaries; there’s no unemployment; there are no housing crises or waves of emigration, or even a tendency for young people leaving home to marry. Meanwhile, not only does the Shire not suffer from internal pressures, but it remains obscure and hardly noticed in global politics.
What makes sense here is that adult hobbits form a loose group. Four parents in a polycule, between them all, may produce four children. All four parents claim to have four children. An outsider would assume this meant the adults had eight children.
Hobbits therefore are not especially fertile or fecund. They simply have large families. Much of their interest in genealogy is due to the complex relationships of blood-kin, hearth-kin, love-kin and pledge-kin, who must all be carefully tracked and measured - not just because you need to make sure that you don’t climb into bed with an un-permitted degree of blood-kin, but to track family alliances and carefully quantify the precise level of thoughtfulness to put into the proper present to gift your father’s lover’s lover (too much implies a degree of intimacy that might upset the polycule.)
Thus, while a hobbit matron may tell a startled dwarf that she has seven sons, she might only have borne five of them herself, and have one hearth-son by her wife, and a pledge-son of her first husband’s. There are between three and four fathers involved at various stages of production, from conception to pledge-duty, but there is debate about the precise number of fathers, as one child was festival-conceived and therefore provisionally pledged to the Brandybucks until more distinctive paternal traits should materialise. It’s expected that four of the sons will be uninterested in women, and their contribution to family life will be in raising hearth-children and pledge-duty. However, this level of detail is normally negotiated later in conversation, as a mutual overture of friendship. So she’s just clear and simple: yes, certainly, she has seven sons. Yes, they’re all hers. Yes, that’s fairly normal - yes, hobbits like big families. How big? That’s really hard to say! Well, about thirteen hobbits live in her house… er, she has forty-three nieces and nephews. Yes! She has nine siblings, that’s correct, but some of them are still babies themselves..
In this way, a bewildered dwarf might assume that hobbits are absurdly fertile, producing an average of seven children per couple, at an absurd pace.
When in fact, with about half of hobbits never bearing biological children, the population of hobbits is pretty much always the same.
Tl:dr, hobbit population works perfectly well, both internally and in the perceptions of outsiders, if the majority of the Shire is gay, they’re all polyamorous, and they all firmly claim to be parents of high numbers of children. Of course Frodo fathered Sam’s kids - he named them! They were pledge-kin but not hearth-kin, as Frodo needed a lot of quiet and stability in the home.
No outsider ever parses hobbit genealogy well enough to understand this except for Gandalf, who never explains anything either.
are you kidding? Gandalf would WEAPONIZE his knowledge of Hobbit genealogy against outsiders
Since “pledge” kinships are multidimensional and can occur in different directions, hobbits can form - and formalise - family bonds simply because they choose to. Gandalf doesn’t tell anyone that the formation of Thorin’s Company, the Fellowship of the Ring, and Belladonna Took’s Accidental Troop of Mercenaries* are legal formations of pledge-siblings, a hobbit family structure usually claimed to increase social class and prestige (as high numbers of pledge-kin confer distinction on a hobbit, being a sort of popularity vote/endorsement that adds greatly to their social power. Incidentally, this is partly why Bilbo was both controversial and successful in his pledge-claim of Frodo; outsiders mistook his “bachelor” status as someone living outside of heteronormativity, while the Shire was bewildered and increasingly annoyed by his rejection of pledge and hearth commitments. By rights Bilbo had too few pledge-kin, and too little parenting experience, to claim rights to an orphan, especially one from Brandybuck hearth; but conversely, his social status was high enough that his belated bid for his very first pledge-son couldn’t reasonably be denied by anybody.)
In short, all of the hobbits enjoyed achieving even larger families on their adventures, legally and without argument or debate. It’s free real estate. If nobody else is going to sibling these losers, we will. (The condensation of so many entanglements at once also legally made Pippin his own father-in-law.)
Gandalf never explained.
* see the post about the Old Took’s “enchanted diamond cufflinks” that obeyed the wearer’s commands; which were probably, given the general state of things, two lost silmarils recovered by his Remarkable Daughters and gifted to him because things stay small and safe in the shire
@elodieunderglass wouldn't that make pippin both denethor's pledge-son-in-law, and (as pledge-brother to the king) probably outrank him?
Only through Boromir while Boromir was alive! Pippin’s familial claim through Boromir technically dissolved on Boromir’s death, as Denethor hadn’t been privy to it, and those bonds rarely stretch to a stranger when the person in the middle has died before introducing them; although Pippin, who was well-brought-up, perfectly and politely rectified the problem at once by simply swearing himself as Denethor’s pledge-son. but through his blood-cousinship to Frodo, who was older than Boromir, his status as the Took double-primarc (don’t ask) and the proximity-enhanced status-doubling effects of having a five-way cousin in Merry, Pippin was demonstrably higher status as a pledge-sibling and was also his own father-in-law and approved of himself. As such, he would have significantly raised Boromir’s social status and marital prospects in the Shire.
Inheritance follows parent-child pledge as the primary consideration, with matrilineal descent as the secondary. Pippin would have been bewildered to gradually understand that Denethor held his two sons in such odd and different standing :-/ hobbits don’t recognise kingship so it would’ve been very upsetting and disappointing to Pippin to understand how Denethor stood in position of sworn-father to a whole city of people without even being slightly fair to his younger hearth-son. Aragorn is demonstrably much better dad-material and therefore had Pippin’s vote. Pippin, by virtue of being an excellent father-in-law to a spectacularly promising young son-in-law, also considered himself a better candidate for king of Gondor than Denethor, by outranking him in Dad Competence - but was too busy by the time he realized this to point this out .
Ironically, the events in which Pippin realized this made Faramir his own hearth-son - so Pippin won in the end and took a great interest in ceremonially approving of Eowyn. Gandalf never explained
I will buy that for a dollar, yup.
It crossed my dash again! The Hobbit Polyamory Post!
🐉 Thezoomieking on IG
Per @spoonstrek
chinese hanfu by 十三余
OP: "The bride herself is coming now!"
A traditional bridal sedan pickup, where a sedan chair carried by 8 people is sent to fetch the bride from her home and bring her to the groom's home. The one in purple is the matchmaker, and the one in white (riding the horse) is the groom.
Writing 順風順水順財神 with two brushes: "Wishing everything (life, work, making money) goes well".
The inscription on the left is the year (丙午; 2026), season (春月; spring), and OP's username (其人書者). The year is written using the 60-year cycle calendar 干支 (gan1zhi1), so it could refer to 2026, 1966, etc.